'Orientalism,' Then and Now - <AUTHOR> https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/05/20/orientalism-then-and-now/ <comment><USER2> > The expeditionary force that Napoleon Bonaparte sent to Egypt in 1798 > included 122 scientists and intellectuals, among them a handful of > professional Orientalists. The history of Orientalism is rich in tales of > Westerners assuming Oriental masquerade, as if they wanted to become, and > not simply to master, the Other.

It would be 30 years _after_ this attempt to 'master' the Other, that the Greek war for independence from the Ottoman empire was won.

It boggles the mind how one can write such a long article on history, without even the briefest mention of Arab invasions and colonialism in Europe (or slavery - "between 1 million and 1.25 million Europeans were captured between the 16th and 19th centuries by Barbary corsairs, who were vassals of the Ottoman Empire, and sold as slaves." [1]).

As much as this article tries to paint the Orient as being viewed by Europe as some sort of curiosity, it was in fact an existential threat for the better part of a millennium.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_slave_trade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_slave_trade)

<comment><USER3> That's not an "existential threat". No European state bothered to care about that piracy until Sweden and the US in [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_Wars](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_Wars) . The bigger states were evidently happy to pay the tribute—this is cost cutting not defense.

<comment><USER4> Don't know about the Barbary corsairs and piracy, but in Slovenia we very much saw Ottoman invasions as an existential threat. Our history is littered with reference to "The big bad Turk who steals your kids, razes your fields, and rapes your wives".

That shit happened. Regularly. To the point that a whole cultural heritage around fortified churches developed. The peasants would retreat into their church behind battlements, and hunker down until the Ottomans left. The village would get burned down and the crops were gone, but at least almost everyone survived.

It didn't help that the Habsburg monarchy saw this as a successful strategy. Oh okay they're just burning the peasants, at least they're not getting as far as Vienna. This is working.

Of course once or twice they did get as far as Vienna and it was bad ...

This period of history left a deep seated distrust of islamic nations so strong that the whole "islam vs. catholic/orthodox" thing still featured as a driving force in the mid 90's Balkan wars. As an interesting curiosity, if you go to Bosnia around the Mostar region you can see a very interesting divide. Left side of the river littered with church spires, right side full of minarets. Barely any mixing.

<comment><USER3> Barbary pirates != Ottoman empire. What you talk about was the effect of a strong empire. A weakened one that couldn't effectively control North Africa also could dominate south-eastern Europe as much.

Everything you say is true and unrelated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I enjoyed Orientalism. My problem with so many of these works, however, is that they seem to take such an intentional stance. Like the assertion that the language of Orientalism serves to create an other in order to. . .

Like, wait right there.

One of the most valuable insights from scholarship like this is that we are all trapped in power structures. The "othering" that happens isn't the result of some demonic intention, it's just what people do. While Said takes great pains to make this point, most readers of the book that I've interacted with do not seem to grasp it. When I finished Orientalism I kind of chuckled because in many ways he engaged in the process that he was describing, "Occidentalizing" western area studies, as it were. I know it's not, but at some level I kind of hoped the book was a big meta-joke to illustrate the inescapability of the dynamic.

<comment><USER6> > Like the assertion that the language of Orientalism serves to create an > other in order to. . . > Like, wait right there.

Then you got further than I did! Someone should have dragged that guy to math class -- before you can prove two things are the same, you have to first define both of them, then make your case.

<comment><USER7> That's not what critical theorists think; for them, often the process of describing a phenomenon involves looking at how "it" behaves. The idea that everything must be defined analytically before it is used or analyzed shuts one off from a lot of possible insight. For example, the debate as to whether porn is art continues to this day, but we have analyzed both porn, art and porn as art before we were ever clear on the matter rigourously speaking. Furthermore, to impose a definition is to trap a concept (usually a historically contingent one) in a moment, which isn't always useful. There are some works on the matter of definitionalism that make this point better but I can't find them right now. I'm short, critical theory and philosophy are different sciences (another thorny word to define, but we use it regardless of the intellectual poverty of some of its widely accepted definitions) to mathematics.

<comment><USER6> Sure, I completely agree that a book discussing porn vs art can't literally start with definitions they way a math book can, that's too narrow.

But if it wishes to use an existing word like "art" in a new sense, for instance to claim that all portrayal of humans is inherently pornographic, then IMHO it needs to be very careful to distinguish this from pre-existing meanings. The fact that some building on campus has "art" chiseled into the marble cannot be assumed to already imply agreement with some new meaning you invented 5 pages ago, a meaning which would have been very surprising to the guys who sponsored the building.

Even if you ultimately make a convincing case that the sense you describe is somehow more correct/useful/interesting than other ones, or encompasses them, you've got to act as if you haven't yet shown that. That's what I meant he should have learned in math class. And really the more honest course is to introduce new words for new concepts, not to try to muddle older ones, as Said successfully did.

But, to be fair, I didn't finish the book.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> From the article: " With Orientalism, Said wanted to open a discussion about the way the Arab-Islamic world had been imagined by the West—not to prevent a clear-eyed reckoning with the region's problems, of which he was all too painfully aware."

Well that's the basic problem right there. Did Said assume there was no need to do a serious study of the Middle East's problems and what causes them, because he assumed that if the West would just leave the Middle East alone, it would all on its own solve its problems? Certainly that is what a lot of his followers seem to think, that the world was an egalitarian paradise until evil White people can along and started oppressing everybody.

</comment><comment><USER9> Imo the problem with the article, and perhaps if it is a faithful representation of the original idea of orientalism, is that it is incoherent.

>As Said argued, Orientalism's failure was "a human as much as an intellectual one; for in having to take up a position of irreducible opposition to a region of the world it considered alien to its own, Orientalism failed to identify with human experience, failed also to see it as human experience."

Alright, but considering the rest of continental philosophy and post-modern thought it is a literal impossibility to do this ever, even with one's own culture and even with one's previous and future selves.

How can it be an indictment on anyone to not have done something that one is actually unable to do?

If, in the 19th century, before Amazon and YouTube, and Instagram, and Facebook, you lived in England, in a village where most people barely even ever travelled farther than the next village over, and you came into contact with radical alterity how else could you be expected to respond. And as, again according to post-modern philosophy (say Baudrillard in this case) you get closer to this difference you actually start changing it so it becomes more and more like you. So you are either in this state of being orientalist, or in a state of intense globalization, and someone making a critique from this moral high road of globalization about this bucolic, parochial state of the orientalist is probably someone similar to a policy wonk referring to a basket of deplorables, which is just another kind of power-knowledge relation, which is what the critique is meant to make clear in the first place.

To think about Foucault's preface to Anti-Oedipus, the problem is we can never really escape from this stuff. And the problem with ever even making a statement such as this is that it is incoherent in the sense that one never comes away clean, basically because always and already the claim of tu quoque can be leveled. I mean sure it doesn't strictly speaking invalidate the claim there is this power relation, but when we're so stuck in the middle of them all the time in every way, as Foucault said, the strategic adversary becomes fascism itself, not the historical fascism, but our love of power and how it causes us to act everyday, and how it makes us love it even as it dominates us. And that is very difficult to uncover if you're leveling a claim of inappropriate relation to any one group, because the problem is our humanity, not the content of our relations or historically contingent facts. Putting names to faces makes it opaque, because the reality is any human occupying a similar role would act inappropriately, so what you do is you attack the role not the name.

It may be that Said does that. I have never gotten around to reading the book, but just going off of the confused article posted, I just felt there was a sort of mishmash without a really clear and distinct thesis, and that what the facade was hiding in a metaphorical sense was paving stones to be thrown in the next revolution, rather than an attempt to end violence or power relations altogether.

<comment><USER10> Not everyone subscribes to your philosophical belief that empathy is impossible.

<comment><USER11> You mean people don't have empathy for his position?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Said's original work was just as myopic as this more recent revisit. There are so many issues with this article that it's difficult to list them all.

The author completely ignores the long history of conflict and colonialism in the opposite direction, namely from the Islamic world and into Europe. The idea of "the Other" is actually codified in Islamic law with religious minorities forced to wear distinctive clothing (the yellow mark for Jews predates its use in Germany by centuries) and pay special taxes, as well as numerous other restrictions.

Another tactic used by this author is to argue against the most extreme and least educated of the 'Orientalists' (Sheldon Adelson and Steve Bannon) instead of engaging with more thoughtful critics of current Islamic culture like Sam Harris and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

My last point is that this guy also forgets Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. His examples of 'experts' who misunderstand the Arab world for a nefarious purpose can just as easily apply to political 'experts' in the US who couldn't have fathomed that someone like Donald Trump could ever win the presidency.

<comment><USER13> >this guy also forgets Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Perhaps he is just not a fan of aphorisms pulled from Murphy's law themed joke books.

Though the trouble with Hanlon's law is not in its origins, rather it is that malice and stupidity are not in any regard mutually exclusive and also that people are quite adept at disguising malice as stupidity.

<comment><USER14> I do not think the benefit of Hanlon's law is intended to be predictive. It seems rather more like a commentary on how our beliefs about people tend to be self-fulfilling prophecies.

<comment><USER13> I just think it is a clumsy version of giving someone the benefit of the doubt. Is a social grace you can grant people to not look too closely at what they are doing and assume the best about them. And in moderation it is a good thing to be doing. It is definitely not a good approach to analysis of academia or government however, which is where I often see it used, usually to defend ones outlook or respective 'team'.

edit - it also makes me very suspicious about Hanlon. Maybe not the first person I would trust if they tried to play dumb.

<comment><USER14> I think it is mostly useful as a self-check for the types of people prone to paranoia. I easily develop that sort of mindset and it's been a huge help to my personal worldview.

<comment><USER13> That is a good use for it. Perhaps the Murphy's Law series is actually a collection of koans from an occult western zen tradition.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Trigger Warnings and Mass Psychogenic Illness - <AUTHOR> https://quillette.com/2018/11/02/trigger-warnings-and-mass-psychogenic-illness/ <comment><USER2> The essay mentions Jonathan Haidt's "The Coddling of the American Mind", so I will chime in with a pertinent excerpt which has data that the essay doesn't mention.

>A 2016 report by the Center for Collegiate Mental Health, using data from 139 colleges, found that by the 2015–2016 school year, half of all students surveyed reported having attended counseling for mental health concerns. The report notes that the only mental health concerns that were increasing in recent years were anxiety and depression. Confirming these upward trends with a different dataset, Figure 7.3 shows the percentage of college students who describe themselves as having a mental disorder. That number increased from 2.7 to 6.1 for male college students between 2012 and 2016 (that's an increase of 126%). For female college students, it rose even more: from 5.8 to 14.5 (an increase of 150%). Regardless of whether all these students would meet rigorous diagnostic criteria, it is clear that iGen college students think about themselves very differently than did Millennials. The change is greatest for women: One out of every seven women at U.S. universities now thinks of herself as having a psychological disorder, up from just one in eighteen women in the last years of the Millennials.</comment>


Take Virtual Tours While You Are at Home (Open Source) - <AUTHOR> https://www.gez.la/ <comment><AUTHOR> GitHub: [https://github.com/stfurkan/gez](https://github.com/stfurkan/gez)

#Features

\- Lists places by map and list

\- Track the visited places by using browser's local storage

\- Filters places by place name, country name and type

\- Sorts place list by place name, country name and type

\- Supports Turkish and English languages (based on browser language)</comment>


xUnique – Regenerate Xcode projects on any machine - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/truebit/xUnique

<comment><USER2> Nice, however there is a much simpler solution that works for 99% of cases. [1]

Add a .gitattributes file to the root of your project with the following line:

*.pbxproj binary merge=union

Very occasionally you will get duplicate items but Xcode then warns you can take approbate action.

[1] I started using this approach a couple years ago after finding this:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12909222/tell-git-to- trea...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12909222/tell-git-to-treat- pbxproj-as-text)

<comment><AUTHOR> I did not use this before, but how Git would treat if people commit in the same files(PBXFileReference) but with different UUIDs?

xUnique makes these UUIDS unique for everyone in the project. So there should be no conflicts theoretically.

<comment><USER2> Like I said, there are edge cases but I've been using this with teams for a few years and I hardly ever have to fix the project file.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> If only Apple could just implement this simple fix in xcode itself...

</comment><comment><USER4> This is a nice band-aid. But really this problem is a symptom of Xcode putting way too much redundant information in this file in the first place. It's configuration over convention.

You could eliminate _all_ the file references if you simply codified some conventions on project directory structure. Conventions that people are almost certainly following anyway.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, @ef4, my English is not very good, I do not quite understand "You could eliminate all the file references if you simply codified some conventions on project directory structure", could you please explain a little bit?

I think the merge conflicts are all due to Xcode not using real directories on disk, which means it has to maintain the directory structures in project file.

<comment><USER4> I think we're agreeing.

I was suggesting that Xcode should use real directories on disk.

<comment><USER5> Personally I agree with your statement, there is a lot about the build structure that can just be held standardly on already-working systems .. its nice to have for example, the known debian/ tree structures, etc. 'make dirs'/&etc.

Seems, though, that we humans are infinitely packaging things, at least in the OS space. There are a nearly insurmountable number of ways of setting something up so the computer can execute something for us. Tree-structures, package formats, .desktop files, and all of these things .. its an infinite taxonomy.

Personally, I yearn for a very smart OS which boots straight to console, and yet then implements everything - everything, desktop, games, etc. - in a single language context. In a lab full of beagleboards and arduinos and so on, the desire is to reduce the language-load on the smaller machines. I think that a single-language, wide-open, for these platforms would make for a new OS opportunity.

Not much of a jump from booting a working kernel+load81 "./main.lua" to a new directory structure to follow. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Agree with Ryan. Repo Management in XCode would make sense only if this feature was there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, Apple should have take out more brilliant idea to solve it thoroughly. At present, I think my solution is the best one;)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's your favorite *non* tech talk? - <AUTHOR> What are your favorite talks that are not appropriate for the "What's your favorite tech talk?" thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12637239)? <comment><USER3> Leslie T. Chang: The voices of China's workers [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bc2wVyl8RLI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bc2wVyl8RLI)

Dambisa Moyo: Is China the new idol for emerging economies? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q2aznfmcYU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q2aznfmcYU)

Yang Lan: The generation that's remaking China [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-sxBTNF2U8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-sxBTNF2U8)

Eric X. Li: A tale of two political systems [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0YjL9rZyR0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0YjL9rZyR0)

Eisenhower's Farewell Address [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWiIYW_fBfY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWiIYW_fBfY)

Charlie Chaplin: The Great Dictator - Final Speech [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1fMvLbE85E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1fMvLbE85E)

The Newsroom: Why America isn't the greatest country in the world anymore. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPHSXUS0_1c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPHSXUS0_1c)

The Matrix - Red dress scene [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hw88MWoqenQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hw88MWoqenQ)

Men in Black - <USER2> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkCwFkOZoOY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkCwFkOZoOY)

Noam Chomsky on American Foreign Policy and US Politics [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwqkvF7umpk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwqkvF7umpk)

Carl Sagan - Pale Blue Dot [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PN5JJDh78I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PN5JJDh78I)

Carl Sagan - Man in his arrogance [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSrL0BXsO40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSrL0BXsO40)

Carl Sagan on Religion [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBCFQtDLPA0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBCFQtDLPA0)

Danny Trejo interview: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21klS5H32z8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21klS5H32z8)

Larry King Interview [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aKjQxxKZNY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aKjQxxKZNY)</comment>


"More eyeballs == Secure code": But is it just a theory or happens in practice? - <AUTHOR> Its one thing to say that "open source is secure because anyone can have a look in the source-code", and its totally different to expect lay users of Linux desktops to head over to the source repos of gnome, xfce, unity, etc. and scavenge the code like professional auditors.
Its the job of security auditors to ensure that this code is safe and doesn't contain any malware or adware, none of the lay users have that kind of expertise. And yet, I was astounded today when I came across a comment on reddit made by a senior xfce dev who says that the gnome project doesn't perform any extensive code audits at all[1]. To quote the user Sidnioulz:
> > Has there ever been a code audit for any of the more popular Linux DEs?
> There might have been for KDE? GNOME does not audit anything as far as I'm concerned. They state they review Shell extensions but the involved process has been discussed on their mailing list and it's essentially a "does the code look nice" review rather than a security audit.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/xfce/comments/47eoji/does_xfce_have_a_security_advisory_team/d0d93dk
A senior xfce developer saying this is a matter of grave concern. From what I get from this conversation is that some amount of transparency is needed in the auditing mechanism. In other words, a way to communicate to the lay users that the security audits are taking place all right, and a mechanism for them to ensure the same. This must happen if we want to avoid the next fiasco like that of linux mint. Granted that the mint fiasco doesn't relate directly to the source audits of gnome project, but the larger question here is the importance of security audits. Had their forum software (phpBB) been audited properly, they would have surely avoided a huge loss in trust, PR and reputation.
Moral of the story is: "Make security audits a part of the development process itself, not an afterthought." <comment><USER2> To address the title: It does not happen in practice, and the idea that "simply because code is open-source and viewable, it is more secure" needs to die. It is an open-source fantasy, like Linux on the Desktop.

Code becomes secure when you train your developers, when specialists audit your code, and when you consciously choose safe libraries and frameworks to build upon. Tasks like these all cost time and money and organizations that spend on security are ones with "skin in the game" who can afford to pay for it.

</comment><comment><USER3> More eyeballs actually may mean secure code, but only if those eyeballs know what secure code is and if those eyeballs can be bothered to check out the source code.

Security software cannot be trusted really unless it is open source and people that know what they are doing look it over. Then you build it yourself on your own system and checkpoint every change you merge in.

Almost nobody does this. So you end up with openssl's heartbleed and other problems due to plain insecure coding in combination with actual protocol weaknesses.

It's hard to write secure software and algorithms. The guys writing GUI code care more about performance than security. If your UI is running as root, it is not secure.

</comment><comment><USER4> > Moral of the story is: "Make security audits a part of the development > process itself, not an afterthought."

Then maybe you should start auditing the code yourself instead of just telling others what to do (with their free time)?

<comment><USER5> I don't think you understood the problem or the author's attempt at raising awareness, in the context of a cliche. Never once did he tell others what to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "More eyeballs == Secure code" is a massive simplification to get a tweet/soundbite, and a terrible one because it makes implicit so much about what this actually means.

"More eyeballs" is meant to be in contrast to proprietary code, which is assumed to have a limited number of eye balls looking at it.

As for "secure code", there is no such thing as 100% secure, just as there's no such thing as 100% bug free.

It's all about mitigation and potential. There are various kinds of mitigation, of various levels of strength, appropriateness, and utility.

Mitigation of security issues and bugs when it comes to proprietary, closed code is accomplished by actively paying experienced programmers, quality assurance, and security professionals to write, test, and review the code. This is, however, expensive. Which partly explains why some proprietary, closed code has a bad reputation (not the least of which is that, without access to the code, you can't verify the (marketing) claims made by the vendor).

For open source software, the code is _accessible_ and _available_ to be reviewed by _able /experienced_ people. More eyeballs _can be_ on it. This statement should not imply that more, experienced eyeballs actually are on it (but it often is used as such), nor should imply that lay users are expected to uncover and fix security issues/bugs. There's a lot of code on github and sourceforge that no one has ever looked at other than the author, but it's there able to be looked at (and it _might be_ safe to assume that code on github gets a modicum more attention on average than code on sourceforge, ahem). It doesn't imply it in the same way that "proprietary" doesn't imply that it is actually written, tested, or audited by (paid) professionals either.

I think this statement is a bastardization of two other, statements:

\- "System security should not depend on the secrecy of the implementation or its components", aka, "security through obscurity" [0]

\- "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow", aka Linus's Law [1]

"More eyeballs == secure code" (and Linus's Law) is a statement similar to the Infinite Monkey Theorem[2], and has the same caveats, not the least of which is requiring infinite time and monkeys (or in the case of LL, infinite eyeballs). That doesn't necessarily make it less true, but it does make it less pragmatic. So it's more theory than happens in practice, but it sounds good, _seems_ intuitive, and has been used as a way to encourage/brow-beat proprietary vendors to open source their code (I'm not sure that this has actually worked for anyone, however, because people don't want to use code that has a bad reputation, which actually discourages eyeballs from examining it). Of course, then you get things like phpBB which is open source and notoriously for bad security, which we could say we know because of so many eyeballs using it (if not looking at it). Despite that reputation, it's available and gets used anyway. If this reputation actively discouraged people from using phpBB, then more eyeballs, in the form of users being exposed to insecurity, might yield greater security by people actively avoiding the known, traditionally problematic software in favor of something with a better track record. It is unfortunate that in the case of phpBB, its ubiquity and ease of use trumps that reputation.

Presumably you could combine them both and hire experienced developers, testers, and security professionals to (continuously) audit open source code. This would arguably be better than solely either proprietary code being audited or the code being open source.

There are no silver bullets. You can (attempt to) throw a massive number of eyeballs at the problem, and/or a massive amount of money for the very best eyeballs, but neither guarantees absolute 100% security. And any claims otherwise should be suspect.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27s_Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27s_Law)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem)</comment>


Google and Huawei Are Buddies - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/futuresin/google-has-been-working-with-huawei-raising-questions-17e9f95a3352 <comment><USER2> Wait...hmmm...but I thought Google was built by the CIA.. [https://bit.ly/1IFvbsv](https://bit.ly/1IFvbsv) so confusing (j/k :: sarcasm)...</comment>


Ask HN: The Case for the "Front End Engineer" Role - <AUTHOR>

I've spent 5yrs now doing FE Engineering. In our industry, thats grand total of 0 proof that I know programming. I accept that. What I still don't get is the interviewing cycle though. The interviews for the role continue to surprise, borderline shock me.I think I've been lucky to stumble across a few challenging jobs so far. In all of them, the fundamentally challenge was designing curation heavy environments(think photoshop) with lots of JS. This is eventually a systems design challenge rather than algorithm design.
This has made be believe that FE roles are primarily system design problems not algorithm design. My belief goes all the way back to the language itself. JS started as scripting language. Not a heavyweight like Java. As AJAX grew as a pattern over the last decade, we wrote lots of tiny scripts. We needed a way to manage  1000s of such snippets. It was driving us crazy. This is where it became a systems design problem. Case in point: rampant growth of JS MVC frameworks.
What makes FE Eng. different is that we care for the pixel till the end. Most people don't internalize that. Just imagine working with illustrator for a day and instead of having a mouse to move objects, now you have to do it with numbers. Most folks with a heavy interest in algorithm design will cry at that task. Thats almost too blue collar for them. Maybe thats true… but that is work! Someone has to do it.
I have given interviews at several places now for FE Engineering role. A lot of times interviewers are engineers who think of it as a blue collar job. Hence, it quickly devolves into a self-boasting and a narcissist activity to prove that whose more white collar. The whole experience has an undertone that you are either a failed CS graduate or don't have a degree and hence you are no match for me.
So what am i missing? Are we interviewing the right way or are their gaps in my understanding? Help me understand how i should re-think about it. <comment><USER3> People are generally not taught how to interview well. To most, it's not a skill to be honed. I find this occurs often in software development, when engineers are asked to participate in the interview process.

This is why you still get companies, who pride themselves on having progressive engineering cultures, defaulting to whiteboard interviews, bland comp sci trivia, and puzzle questions even though they're proven to be awful indicators of on-the-job success.

Ten years ago this is how people were interviewed when they first got into the industry, so that's the only way they know how to interview now, despite the demographic and tooling significantly changing in software development.

</comment><comment><USER4> Go back 10 years, front end only wasn't really a thing. This is new and a lot of folks haven't adapted (and maybe they won't).

Someone in a non technical role once suggested to me that we should all be able to do each others role, and that is now entirely unfeasible. The front end has evolved so far away from the back end as to be ridiculous.

I think your problem is who your talking to and working with. Keep shopping around and sharpening your skills, you will find a place that respects what you do, what it takes, and the talent involved.

<comment><AUTHOR> A lot of engineers think I want to race against them in a bid for who is the smartest person in the room == algorithm design. I actually dont.

I am happy not being the smartest person. I am also happy accepting that maybe their role deserves a higher financial comp. if thats what is bothering them.

There is no point name calling companies in my experience who I think do this wrong but I'll take the opportunity to give a shout out to a few who do it right imo. Companies like Netflix, Apple and Uber for me have been the best interview experiences in this vein.

<comment><USER4> As a back end guy the things that get me excited are "we shaved XXms off of that request by doing something". That isn't the nature of front end work at all. I don't disrespect the things front end folks do, the browser is just another client, no different than IOS or android.

You have a rich environment to work in, and there are plenty of things to get excited about in it! What were full page reloads 10 years ago, can be partial loads of new data today, that can and will have material impact on bandwidth and server resources used! You can cut down render times, and optimize the hell out of a user experience (this change has XXX higher conversion making us more money or keeping eyes on the site longer). Don't be afraid to talk about your value and put it out there, figure out what is going to excite you and track it!

As for interviews, well they are always a mixed bag in the field (we still don't know how to do them right)! Find a place you like with people you like, and build a network! Your next job should not be a random interview but rather a phone call to those folks and a conversation about "what its really like where they are".

Lastly about the money. Well thats a mess across the board to. Bad actors who get paid more exist everywhere, and were not on a good path to fix that. Were seeing a lot of the disparity in pay between front and back end disappear, but it takes time.

<comment><AUTHOR> I feel another strong issue in the mix is that we just don't know how to fill our 60min time slots with questions that are more relevant to front-end engineering.

In absence of literature, we resort to what we have experienced and that starts a long conversation about some problem with a back-tracking algorithm at work. The reality is that we are either afraid or ignorant to admit we dont know how to check skills for the role.

The interview panel IMO should be a mix from fields like engineering, design, product management and marketing instead of just engineering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think you make an excellent observation that FE is a system engineering challenge.

Algorithms do play an important role as you can see in this great presentation by Marc de Marco ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90NsjKvz9Ns](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90NsjKvz9Ns))

However I think it's fair to say most FE engineers apply existing solutions and the system design is a bigger part of their role.

I differentiate between UI Engineering and Front-End Engineering. The former emphasises design integration (pixels) and performance (rendering). The latter is broader scope and emphasises the systems engineering.

Both have to deal with system design. UI is about components and messaging across the components with the front-end application being the "system". FE is about components that integrate the front-end application with what have traditionally been back-end APIs and services.

In many cases when people say FE they mean both FE and UI. I would not get hung up on these but they help to clarify what you are talking about and who you are trying to hire.

In the case of design and pixels there are specific challenges around dealing with layout and CSS and achieving 60fps. Creating UI components is an exciting area. For example see Pure UI ([http://rauchg.com/2015/pure- ui/](http://rauchg.com/2015/pure-ui/)) by @rauchg. Mess in Web Components ([https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/06/the-state-of-web- component...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/06/the-state-of-web- components/)). Challenge of style encapsulation...

So there are a lot of unique challenges and skills and experience required in UI engineering.

There are also exciting developments that start to push more overlap between UI and FE. For example GraphQL - the UI is "language" that "programs" what was traditionally the back-end API.

I sounds like you have had some unfortunate interview experiences. The interview process should be about uncovering the talent and potential - <USER2> one-upmanship.

I have an article on Medium that is the foundation of my interviews: [https://medium.com/@johanstn/initiating-ui-engineering- conve...](https://medium.com/@johanstn/initiating-ui-engineering- conversations-946906b4c710)

What are you missing? I would not say you are missing anything. Rather a case of pulling together your skills and focussing them on what you really enjoy doing. It sounds like it is UI more than FE. If that's correct then your engineering expertise will lie on componentization, engineering applications ("system") and UI performance.

Demonstrate your skills with real examples, projects, code you use to learn and experiment.

<comment><AUTHOR> I really like your article on Medium on initiating UI Engineering questions.

It took me a while but as an interviewer myself, i realized that I need to move away from an interviewing style that is strictly looking for answers that can be evaluated objectively. A couple of them are good to check for fundamental know-how but a process designed around just them just doesn't bring the right balance. Both left and right part of the brain need to be cross-checked on for a good candidate.

<comment><USER5> Depending on the level and requirements of the role, junior to senior, coding to architecture, the emphasis shifts from what you can do today with specific knowledge and understanding, to what you think we should be doing tomorrow with insights and reasoned opinion.

The answers are important but how you answer the questions, or reason about them when you don't know, more so.</comment></comment></comment>


HiFive – RISC-V-based Linux development board - <AUTHOR> https://www.sifive.com/products/hifive-unleashed/ <comment><USER2> For those complaining about price, you might want to look into costs that go into ASIC's. Adapteva has a nice write-up on that with their strategies for getting cost down. Note that it was critical to have a few million with a strategy that their own write-up said couldn't work if priced for consumer market. They'd have to charge more or have ridiculous volume.

[http://www.adapteva.com/andreas-blog/a-lean-fabless- semicond...](http://www.adapteva.com/andreas-blog/a-lean-fabless- semiconductor-startup-model/)

The HiFive product uses a CPU they developed on 28nm. That's one of most expensive nodes you can use. Depending on if and how they split cost, fabbing those chips could've cost over a million dollars in masks. Low-volume, RISC workstations used to cost five digits each on older nodes. Getting a low- volume CPU on cutting-edge node for a grand is a great improvement. So long as they ship products that work as claimed.

There's been a lot of vaporware in FOSS-type hardware...

<comment><USER3> Do those costs somehow not apply to ARM SoCs?

<comment><USER2> The rule of thumb is to not do an ASIC unless you're selling at least 100,000 units if you want it cheap per unit. The ARM SoC's that get used in a lot of products probably are selling in really high volume. To illustrate the effect, a product that cost $100,000 to design would break-even at $1 a unit in that volume but $1,000 a unit if only 100 were sold. That's idealized: you generally have to pay for the masks, a wafer per set of chips that fit on one (number varies), absorb/charge the cost of broken chips, IC packaging for the chips, shipping, storage, etc. That's not counting boards, assembly or whatever.

So, selling something in high volume like big-name ARM's gets the prices way down per unit. Getting to high volume is a marketing and product development problem more than a technical one. Good luck on the startup. :) The ecosystem benefits will give ARM-based solutions an advantage there for a while into the future. The RISC-V chips will cost more due to lower volume unless all the heavy costs are absorbed at a loss by whoever builds them. I've recommended Universities or foundations attempt that to get good, FOSS chips started on good nodes with them sold at material, assembly, and distribution cost from there.

OpenPITON is another one with potential since they have prototypes for 32-core, OpenSPARC CPU's at 32nm. Leon3 GPL was an older one in SPARC. J2 (SuperH-style) is a compact one that's about 3 cents a core in 180nm with who knows what performance, energy usage and pricing could be achieved at 28nm-32nm. CHERI, a capability-secure extension of MIPS, could be ported to one to give it a security advantage to secure sales from defense sector. Draper is aiming for that with SAFE architecture (crash-safe.org) added to RISC-V. If wanting max reliability (eg safety-critical), VAMP was a 32-bit DLX CPU formally-verified for correctness that could be done on older node with mods for lock-step, triplicated redundancy, or board-level fault-tolerance.

So, there's possibilities to justify higher prices long enough to recover upfront costs or get them down on simpler designs. The HiFive is a serious core on a relatively-recent node, though. It's not going to be cheap unless selling boatloads. They probably didn't expect this product to sell boatloads, either.

<comment><USER4> don't forget the cost of testing - that adds up, often people do simple testing on the wafer to avoid the cost of packaging bad die, then full testing once packaged - remember a bad chip for a semi manufacturer is a whole bad board for their customers

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is really cool, and I'd love to buy one, but it's an order of magnitude too pricey for me to justify the purchase when I already have a (admittedly probably slightly weaker) raspberry pi gathering dust.

<comment><USER6> This board isn't really intended to be a "raspberry pi for everyone" style release, its pretty much soley aimed at developers and companies that want to port their software to RISC-V so when the cheaper boards do arrive, they will have software to run on them.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure there will be cheaper boards, to be honest. Just more fully functional ones with more peripheral types and added features I'm sure. This is a workstation-class CPU they are developing, not a RasPi competitor.

<comment><USER8> I'm curious to know what leads you to consider the RISC-V to be a "workstation-class CPU". As I understand it's an ISA that aims to be pretty broad, and is expected to compete (at least initially) with low-end embedded MIPS chips that are pretty ubiquitous everywhere in all sorts of devices.

<comment><USER7> I'm talking about U54 from SiFive specifically.

<comment><USER9> The U54 is a single-issue in-order core. Again, what makes you label that a "workstation-class core"?

<comment><USER7> The company's stated plans for the product line.

<comment><USER9> Hmm, my google-fu seems to be failing me, do you have a link where the company states that?

<comment><USER7> No, I've learned about SiFive from the talks they've given at the RISC-V workshops. I think some of those are recorded, maybe look there? I'm on mobile and it's hard to provide a link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Having an actual RISC-V ASIC is cool, but note that you can run a RISC-V softcore on a significantly cheaper FPGA board - or even in software simulation.

This is more interesting for showing progress in the RISC-V ecosystem than for hacking around with.

<comment><USER11> Honestly, if you want a full MMU with a Linux-capable RISC-V implementation and everything, and a few cores like this -- you'll need a fairly decent FPGA, as well as the clocking resources/peripherals so things aren't unusably slow. You can get cheap FPGAs for the microcontroller-class devices/cores, but the FPGAs SiFive recommend for U-series cores of theirs are quite expensive, like $4000. lowRISC can run on something like a $1500 Kintex-7 devkit, I think. There are better boards coming out soon at better price points (such as this one[1]) that might fit the bill, but then you have to do board setup yourself... It's not worth it IMO unless you plan on reusing the FPGA.

If you want a microcontroller class chip so you can just play with the 32-bit instruction set -- you can get that with QEMU and a $60 HiFive1 board. You can run picorv32 on a $50 FPGA, even! But if you want a Linux-class chip _now_ (with full features you expect e.g. from an ARM-class device) -- this is about as good as it gets, I think. You won't get a 1.5ghz quad core performance like that cheaply. For now. Next year it'll be different, hopefully.

I imagine the real reason this board is pricey is due to limited volume runs for the ASIC on 28nm, which is the bulk (how many people will really buy one? these are early adoption systems), and, I speculate, some of the weird material choices. 8GB DDR4 ECC, ok sure that's cool and unique, but no SATA port? Really, so I'm stuck on a stupidly large microSD card? And they specify FMC, but FMC cards are typically very expensive for high-throughput devices (think HDMI, ADC/DACs, SFP/SFP+ breakouts). Maybe they'll just go all out and have the FMC mount the system directly onto a broken-out PCIe carrier board, or something? I dunno.

As for hacking... all that said, the rather large amount of RAM and relatively fast cores do excite me -- it means you can actually use the parallelism offered for things like actual compilation. And it's real privileged silicon, so for system porters/distros/etc I think it's probably more reasonable of a purchase. I'm eager to get NixOS running on a real silicon device like this, so I've supported it (I had a lot of fun with my HiFive1). If they had just included SATA, this would be almost a no-brainer for integrators/distro porters. I just hope they'll follow up on a decent expansion option... In the mean time until it ships, QEMU should be ironed out enough by now to start a real port...

[1] [https://shop.trenz- electronic.de/en/TEF1001-01-Kintex-7-PCIe...](https://shop.trenz- electronic.de/en/TEF1001-01-Kintex-7-PCIe-FMC-Carrier-with-Xilinx- Kintex-7-160T-4-lane-PCIe-GEN2?c=462)

<comment><USER12> Your speculation is quite accurate...there will be FMC expansion cards specifically built for the HiFive Unleashed that will break out most of those peripherals you're talking about (PCIe, SATA, to name a few in particular). Unfortunately we weren't quite ready to announce those details today but will be making those updates ASAP.

The reason for the large RAMs and microSD card is specifically to help software developers. That's who the board is for until we can drive the cost down even further for even more folks.

-Jack Kang, SiFive

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the confirmation! The microSD card's _speed_ is my main complaint, relative to everything else. But I'm just complaining I guess -- because otherwise I think the board looks very good, without any expansions. :)

It seems every board always has a catch somewhere, but if an FMC expansion can work around this, that'd be excellent. I'm looking very forward to putting this machine through its paces once I get my hands on it!

<comment><USER13> Without the expansion board you'd likely use iSCSI or NFS root for the OS. The SD card would only be used to boot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> From the PDF: "Each U54 core has a high-performance single-issue in-order 64-bit execution pipeline, with a peak sustained execution rate of one instruction per clock cycle.". I.e. lower performance per clock vs an ARM Cortex A53 (2-way in-order execution 64 bit CPU).

As prototype, the price is OK, in my opinion. In volume there is no reason for not selling a tiny board with those specs for under 40 USD (e.g. 2GB RAM Pine 64 quad Cortex A53 boards with gigabit ethernet are below 30 USD, including 3D and video acceleration).

<comment><USER15> While I love the Pine64 concept, the crappy docs and closed graphics blobs means that Linux tends to have all sorts of weirdness, let alone BSD. I can't wait for a first-class open platform.

<comment><USER14> Sure. I would love to buy that RISC-V board. But 1000 USD is way too much. Anyway, it is not a bad start, e.g. exotic ARM dev boards are very expensive, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There is a little more information on the crowdsupply page: [https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive- unleashed](https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive-unleashed)

</comment><comment><USER17> What are the 8 SMA ports for? I've looked at the sifive page and the crowdsupply site as well; haven't been able to figure it out. Not obvious why a RISC-V development board would have SMA ports.

<comment><USER18> Labels are the following:

GEMGXLALTCLK

PROCMON

DDRCTRLALTCLK

DDRPHYALTCLK

DDR_ATB0

DDR_ATB1

DDR_PLL_TESTOUT_P

DDR_PLL_TESTOUT_N

These are just SoC debug headers. Eg: GEMGXL comes from Gigabit Ethernet MAC, and GXL is a marketing term from Cadence.

<comment><USER17> Six appear to be test points for monitoring memory bus clocks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Excited about RISC-V hardware hitting the market, less excited that it's $999. I mean, I get that it's not going to be as cheap as a Raspi, and I'd happily pay $200-300 for something like this. However, at $999, I think I'll wait.

</comment><comment><USER20> Any peripherals on this thing? They mention Ethernet and some SPI flash. How about USB or even a UART? I didn't expect a frame buffer, but what does it actually have? I thought they were going to have PCI via an FPGA, but no sign of that either.

<comment><AUTHOR> They presented this at FOSDEM today, and ran the entire presentation (and a demo afterwards) on the actual hardware. They used PCI via an FPGA to interface with a standard ATI gfx card iirc. I don't know if the video is out yet, but have a look!

<comment><USER21> No video yet that i can find, but it seem the slides are available.

[https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/riscv/](https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/riscv/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What does "Linux-capable" mean? Are there other RISC-V systems that are _not_ "Linux-capable"?

<comment><USER23> Yes, the same company sells arduino compatible RISC-V microcontroller boards that are not capable of running Linux.

<comment><USER24> What does "arduino compatible" mean in that context?

<comment><USER9> AFAIU it means that the I/O pins are compatible with Arduino shields.

 _Disclaimer_ : I have neither a HiFive1 or an Arduino myself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> So the price is high, but I'd actually consider getting one if only they'd exposed PCI ports and put it in, say, a MicroATX form factor or the like.

Maybe someone will make a daughterboard to make that happen for a reasonable price. Then I'd maybe have fun making a little machine to run it. I really like the idea of RISC-V.

Anybody have any idea how many MIPS we're talking here?

<comment><USER26> The FMC adapter item on the specs is an standardised interface adapter. Looking at the instructions for some of the previous dev kits points to an FMC PCIe module that seems like the right kind of thing:

[http://www.hitechglobal.com/FMCModules/FMC_PCIExpress.htm](http://www.hitechglobal.com/FMCModules/FMC_PCIExpress.htm)

Obviously you'd want to check a bit more carefully. I'mjust pointing out that PCIe seems like it's a go-er with the hardware right now even. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'll probably be grabbing one as soon as it makes fiscal sense again. Kinda bummed for the price point, but they aren't a charity.

It'd also be nice if they had an exposed PCIe slot and/or exposed DIMM slots at this price point, but GbE is good enough for rapid testing.

</comment><comment><USER28> They might as well put $10,000 instead $1,000 and it wouldn't change things much - most people interested in the board won't buy it as the price is prohibitive. They would have to go below $100 at the very least.

<comment><USER22> Academic buyers won't have a big problem with that price. It's a drop in the bucket in the scope of all but the smallest research budgets.

<comment><USER29> Eh, if they have a defined project maybe...

$100 = Would buy this on a whim on the off-chance it's usable. Also, would consider buying 12x of them to outfit an undergrad lab.

$1000 = Have to have a clear project/vision in mind of how the board would be used and how other methods (FPGA/emulation) couldn't suffice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Anybody knows why it is so expensive? Is it just the low quantities?

<comment><USER13> I was talking to the SiFive team yesterday and it's down to the relatively small run of wafers they made. The price will come down, likely very dramatically, but not for a while.

This board is very much to get hardware into the hands of developers who are porting software (such as me), it's not really something for end users at this time.

<comment><USER31> What are you porting?

<comment><USER32> We are working on Fedora RISC-V.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It's a great step towards making these chips more generally available. I am sure they will release a low cost dev board like the rpi pretty soon.

</comment><comment><USER34> Could anyone suggest other boards like this with intel cpus equivalent in terms of performance?

<comment><USER35> With intel... any number of PC motherboards. With ARM... any number of quad- core ~1.2GHz boards.

Either of the above can easily be had for a few percent of the cost of the RISC-V board, will likely out-perform it and they're losing money on each one of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Can anyone ellaborate on how this compares to say ARM, intel etc?

<comment><USER37> It's an open source design.

<comment><USER38> It is not AFAIK, this chip contains E51 and U54 cores, E51 from what I seen (when prices were public) costs $595000.

\--- Upd: some news articles still mention launch prices [0]

\- [0] [https://www.eetasia.com/news/article/chinese-start-up- sells-...](https://www.eetasia.com/news/article/chinese-start-up-sells-try- and-buy-si-ip-online)

<comment><USER2> To put that into perspective, reports I read put MIPS at $700-900k with ARM starting at $1+ million. Buyers of those get their ecosystem of existing tools, OS's, libraries, etc. RISC-V doesn't have much of an ecosystem yet. However, if FOSS software covers application requirements, then a SOC using the RISC-V chip saves a lot of money upfront. Even more down the line since SiFive doesn't charge royalties.

(Edited to change part about royalties after reading article more closely.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> woop woop! RISC-V is excellent and I hope this is the first of many!

</comment><comment><USER40> Why so pricey?

</comment><comment><USER41> Virtualization?

UART?

<comment><USER42> Virtualization instructions aren't finished yet: [https://riscv.org/specifications/privileged- isa/](https://riscv.org/specifications/privileged-isa/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> What's a good way to get involved in RISC-V

</comment><comment><USER44> PUN MODE ON

HiFive is the cheapest non-vaporware upgrade path for Amiga enthusiasts (if they bring their own AGA GFX)

PUN MODE OFF

</comment><comment><USER45> Sorry could someone explain to me why this is $999? ( Apart from because they can.)

<comment><USER7> 28nm custom CPUs. They've spent millions on setting up the production run. They are probably losing money on this board alone, to be honest, at that price point and expected sales.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> My ideal SERVER motherboard for home use: Raspberry Pi style.

1\. Compute: A Quad core processor. A73 maybe? 2\. Storage: 1 Sata Port to host 1 Hard disc. for Boot / Storage. 3\. Network: 1 Gigabit Ethernet port. 4\. Power: 1 Micro USB port. 5\. RAM: 1 GB or optional 2 GB. 3\. 1 USB for everything else.

That's it. No Audio port, No HDMI port, No GPIO Port. No Camera port, No extra USB ports. No MicroSD connector. Now considering Raspberry price of $35, I guess board could be done for <$20.

Every few days, I try to find one.

<comment><USER47> What do you think of the new stuff from HardKernel?

<comment><USER46> Awesome. Thanks. ODROID-HC2 is on top of my list now. Waiting for my local retailer to catchup!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Perhaps a cheaper route to have an OS up and running on a reference design for hardware that's too new is to implement it on top of MAME.

Even if it takes an 8-way Xeon Platinum to run it at a reasonable speed, I think more people will be able to experiment with it.

And the emulation provides some neat debugging opportunities.

<comment><USER49> Various RISC-V emulators are available, e.g. you can run Linux on a simulated risc-v processor in qemu.

<comment><USER48> True. I wonder how much of this board's hardware is emulated in there.

<comment><USER13> Quite a lot, see item 3 below:

        $ qemu-system-riscv64 -machine \?
        Supported machines are:
        none                 empty machine
        sifive_e300          RISC-V Board compatible with SiFive E300 SDK
        sifive_u500          RISC-V Board compatible with SiFive U500 SDK
        spike_v1.10          RISC-V Spike Board (Privileged ISA v1.10)
        spike_v1.9           RISC-V Spike Board (Privileged ISA v1.9.1) (default)
        virt                 RISC-V VirtIO Board (Privileged spec v1.10)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Shit HN Says - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says <comment><USER2> EDIT: now it's completely banned, not even on 2nd page.

Aaaand... downgraded from front page by mods.

      3.
      India outsourcing back to USA (washingtonpost.com)
      67 points by nightbrawler 3 hours ago | flag | 26 comments
      ....
      31.  [first of 2nd page]
      Shit HN Says (twitter.com)
      166 points by dsirijus 3 hours ago | flag | 66 comments

<comment><USER3> I was wondering what was with that. It could easily be #1...

<comment><USER2> These are the same kind of moderator games vs. community Digg played before collapsing into oblivion.

<comment><USER4> I think you underestimate how many of us simply flag these kinds of submissions, as they are neither intellectually stimulating, nor do they promote interesting discussions. There probably isn't as much "moderation" on HN as you seem to theorize.

I wouldn't have even seen your comment were it not for the 'new comments' page.

<comment><USER2> No, it's been happening a lot recently. There was a huge thread about it a little while ago. One of the main mods was behind the bans. Also flagging doesn't automatically delete posts, mods do that.

This is very sad, I used to have the highest respect of PG and RTM. But it's dropping like a stone in the water.

<comment><USER5> I thought that if enough users flag a post, it gets automatically deleted. Also, I thought that accumulated flags harms a posts' score. Has anyone said otherwise?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What I want to know is who's running that account?

I want to buy them a chocolate heart or something. Maybe some bacon.

Shaped as a heart.

<comment><USER7>
        What I want to know is who's running
        that account?

Technically, Hacker News.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is fantastic. I followed it immediately. It reminds me of a condensed version of The Daily WTF [1] or perhaps <http://bash.org/>, but for Hacker News. More amusingly, it seems to have that strange meta property in which this thread itself is sure to generate a few more tweets, much in the same way that no one is quite sure if the real Daily WTF is the post itself or the comments that try to solve the problem in the post.

[1] <http://thedailywtf.com/>

</comment><comment><USER9> It's actually not as bad as I expected it to be from the title.

However, the lack of links to sources as well as the obvious limitations of Twitter mean this idea could be executed much better.

<comment><USER10> Really? You want a shithnsays.com? The beauty of this idea is providing smiles in your Twitter timeline once in a while. Not to execute a cool-lean-webscale- startup.

<comment><USER9> It doesn't need its own domain, but the Twitter format is so limited, I'm not very likely to visit this again even though it was quite entertaining. Maybe make it a blog instead? It doesn't need its own domain or anything.

> Not to execute a cool-lean-webscale-startup.

Now you're just attacking a straw man, aren't you? :)

<comment><USER11> You don't use Twitter by visiting individual accounts. Pro-tip: Try the 'follow' feature.

<comment><USER12> Guess what: not everyone has a Twitter account. Freaky, I know.

And before you tell me how I expect to follow Twitter accounts without one of my own, let me tell you that I follow dozens of blogs without having an account in any of them or their platforms.

<comment><USER8> "Guess what: not everyone has a Twitter account. Freaky, I know."

I think Twitter is absolutely the right way to go on something like this. Your post is even more peculiar since Twitter supports RSS. [1] Does your reader not support RSS? (Okay, okay, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, since it actually __isn't__ all that obvious that Twitter does support it; I had to Google it myself).

[1] Here's the one for shit_hn_says: <http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/752430234.rss>

Add it to Google Reader and enjoy! You don't need a Twitter account, so your major concern should be alleviated at this point.

<comment><USER12> I'm not constantly mentioning I don't have a Twitter account. I mentioned it because it's relevant.

 _Your post is even more peculiar since Twitter supports RSS [2]. Does your blog client not support RSS?_

It does, I just wasn't aware that Twitter supported RSS, since nowhere in the page (not even in the source) do they link to it. Can one find its URL without doing arcane magic?

That said, the I do agree that Twitter is a decent place to publish these, although it still has the length limit that prevents them from putting links to the comments.

<comment><USER8> > I'm not constantly mentioning I don't have a Twitter account. I mentioned it > because it's relevant.

Perhaps, but I think my sarcastic tone was warranted, at least before giving a serious answer. You could have said:

"I don't have a Twitter account. How would I follow something like this?"

Instead, you chose the more snarky:

"Guess what: not everyone has a Twitter account. Freaky, I know."

which takes on an almost condescending tone.

Anyway, I've been annoyed myself with the walled garden approach that many of these social sites are taking. Even Facebook has RSS feeds, but it isn't exactly obvious how to get to them. And Twitter seems to be more and more going towards the route of closing off third-party access. But if you're determined enough (and I realize most people won't be; even my finding of the RSS feed was mostly an intellectual exercise), it does appear possible to satisfy your requirements of using your existing Feed system to keep up to date with Twitter posts without having to have a Twitter account.

But like you, I would also have expected that I could simply put the Twitter URL directly into my Reader and have it auto-discover the RSS feed as most proper implementations do. Sadly, this is not the case, and having to somehow know the internals of the Twitter API as a user and not a developer is incredibly convoluted.

Edit: For posterity, I went ahead and removed the snarkiness. Chain broken.

<comment><USER12> _I think my sarcastic tone was warranted, at least before giving a serious answer._

But my post was itself snarky in response to narcan's "Pro-tip". It's a snark chain!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Like everyone else I would like them to add the post id so people can easily find the source of the quote.

I also think that a distinction should be made between comments that are ridiculous (like Node.js being close to the metal) versus surprising (what one quote claims is true - men actually are over-represented in the top 1% of the population by IQ - of course men also dominate the bottom 1%).

<comment><USER14> IQ does not equal intelligence, except possibly in the extreme subsets of mental abilities which actually feature on the test. It's not been treated seriously in the scientific community for almost ever. It's almost solely a cargo cult for people who excel at it and want to feel superior.

<comment><USER13> The scientific debate is much more complex than you give it credit for. Yes, there really are people who believe that IQ, or (to be more sophisticated) g, really has validity. I personally view it as convenient shorthand, but not real. However this is not a universal position. For a take on why it is probably not valid, see <http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/523.html>.

But whether or not you accept that IQ is meaningful, the following fact remains true. On a wide variety of abilities that we can measure, including most specific mental attributes (working memory, processing speed, etc), males have much higher variability than females. The average gender differences are small, but men are over-represented in both tails. That fact is true both when abilities are measured in isolation, or on a test that aggregates them, like a standard IQ test.

See <http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_10.html#cronin> for an example of where this is discussed.

<comment><USER15> Of course, it's not politically correct to say that there are more guy geniuses than girl geniuses, no matter how convincing the data may be. Saying that there are more male idiots is presumably perfectly okay; people who care about such things generally only care if it's the "minority" (never mind that women are a numerical majority in the US [1]).

Caveats: I don't know how convincing the data is. My point is that the discussion would not change even if the science happened to be completely airtight. Anecdotally, many of the intelligent people I've met over the years have happened to be women, so I'm inclined to believe in equality or even a female-favorable situation for the high tail (but how this is affected by socialization and cultural expectations is a topic for another post).

[1] <http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html>

<comment><USER13> You are right.

The evidence on that correlation is actually very strong. However in our society there is an effect that goes a long way to hide it. For a number of reasons (including earlier puberty), women have a significant academic advantage in high school. This means that about 60% of people heading to college are women.

So if you're in an environment with lots of young college educated young people, all will be reasonably smart (they had to be to get into college), and you have on average about half-again as many women as men. If you just take this population and look for the top quartile, women are still over- represented relative to men.

What about the smart men that I said existed, where are they? They are everywhere. It turns out that if your IQ is in the top 2%, you have worse odds of finishing high school than if your IQ is median. Lots of smart people make it nowhere near college for various combinations of reasons. If you mostly hang out with college graduates, you might never notice that, for instance, there are some really smart car mechanics out there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Interesting that it appears to be being run by hand using Buffer (<http://bufferapp.com/>). From outward appearance at least, not a bot.

<comment><USER17> How to botify this? The easiest I can think of is to keep polling for the most downvoted comment ... any fancy information retrieval effort is bound to generate false positives.

And oh yes ... I see what you are thinking, HN Hall of Shame - handles with get most downvotes/week ranked in reverse sorted. Reverse gamification. It obviously needs to be like a leaderboad. And obviously has to have a REST api. Now you want "web-scale" -- Node.js+MongoDb+HTML5 charts ...

<comment><USER18> I think the aim would be to poke fun at the bubble community rather than downvoted comments.

Some of the most upvoted comments on HN are the most ridiculous and absurd.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I love it. I searched for a few of these just to confirm that real comments were being used.

Was not disappointed.

<comment><USER20> Oh wow. These are real? I thought they were mostly jokes.

<comment><USER21> Needs links really.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> ... and when assembly isn't fast enough then I drop down to binary.

</comment><comment><USER23> We now have to make sure all our sentences are longer than 140 chars to avoid being featured.

Unless you want to be featured of course.

</comment><comment><USER24> How long before this thread goes recursive?

<comment><AUTHOR> 23 minutes ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think it would be way cooler if they were quoted word for word (with a link to the original post).

<comment><USER26> This. I wanted to source some of these to make sure they were legit and turned up empty. But I know some of them are real because I read the originals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> We'll now have a nice list of HN readers on twitter

</comment><comment><USER28> I was expecting more misogyny. I may be spending too much time on reddit.

(Edit: To be clear, I'm referring to the group "Shit Reddit Says", who highlight and then downvote instances of misogyny and the like in reddit comments).

</comment><comment><USER29> HN is starting to go meta like Reddit went and I'm not sure that's a good thing. How on earth is it productive or healthy to publicly ridicule HN commenters?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's popping some HN bubbles. I find that extremely healthy, if not neccesarily productive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> See also: <http://twitter.com/HackerNewsTips>

</comment><comment><USER12> Oh look, copyright infringement ;)

</comment><comment><USER31> I have a feeling this thread will be made pseudo-dead. [and this post haha]

</comment><comment><USER32> Because there isn't enough retarded shit on twitter.

</comment><comment><USER33> I've been out-jerked. :(

</comment><comment><USER34> See also: <http://twitter.com/hackernews_txt>

</comment><comment><USER35> This is fairly retarded. It's not hard to make something look foolish when you take a single sentence out of context.

<comment><USER36> If those tweets actually appeared in text somewhere on Hacker News, they are foolish regardless of the context they were taken from. Dropping down to node.js to get close to the metal? Come on!

Love it.

<comment><USER37> _Dropping down to node.js to get close to the metal?_

It's actually not that strange of a remark, depending on context.

<comment><USER38> with what definition of metal again?

<comment><USER39> Why, V8 of course.

<comment><USER38> that's still an "unusual" (to say the least) definition.

<comment><USER36> Hopefully sarcastic.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Covid-19 Map by Temperature? - <AUTHOR> Has anyone created a Covid-19 map by average current temperature in the country?
The Johns Hopkins map seems to show this hitting the northern hemisphere (exiting winter currently) worse than the southern hemisphere (exiting summer).  I am curious if the temperature plays a role here.
I know the virus has a lipid layer protecting it, and that is sensitive to heat.  I am wondering if warmer temperatures are going to help out here in the northern hemisphere, and if so, my thoughts is this is going to be become seasonal like the flu. <comment><USER2> Google covid by latitude. Lot of papers.</comment>